UK Short Story Competition Open Now!

This year heralds the third annual BAME short story competition run by The Guardian Newspaper and 4th Estate team. The prize celebrates the talents of British ethnic minority writers who are in need of representation and promotion.

The winner will receive a chance to win £1,000, an exclusive one‑day publishing workshop and a taste of online publication.

Last year’s winner, Lisa Smith, had her story Auld Lang Synepublished on the Guardian news website. The story follows a man in his 70s, Rufus Samuels, during an evening in jail after an altercation with his much younger girlfriend. It is a absorbing story of masculinity and ageing.

“Writing is exposing, so to have people from the literary world praise my work and reward it was a tremendous boost to my confidence.”

Sian Cain, Guardian books site editor and competition judge said of the short story:

“(It’s) a perfect example of what the short story can do when the form is at its best: containing as much of an emotional blow as that of a 800-page novel, regardless of its brevity.”

The prize is open to all Black, Asian, minority ethnic writers aged 18 or over who live in the UK or Ireland.

We all love an independent bookshop and thankfully the UK is still full of these little treasures in almost every town. The British Book Awards, or Nibbies, has revealed the regional shortlists for the 2019 Independent Bookshop of the Year, an award that is sponsored by Gardners Books.

The Bookseller reports that in all, forty-eight bookshops are competing, from nine regions of the UK and are all hoping to win in their local area before going forward to compete for the overall, nationwide prize.

Here are the shortlisted books for each region. We have some of the bookshops listed in our bookshop section so the ones featured are linked:Read More

This year marks 15 years of The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize which celebrates children’s and teenage literature. This year’s shortlist, like every previous year, is made up of books chosen by Waterstones’ own booksellers. The category winners and overall Children’s Book of the Year 2019 will be announced soon, on March 21st 2019.

This year, the Wellcome Book Prize which “rewards exceptional works of literature that illuminate the many ways that health, medicine and illness touch our lives,” is celebrating its 10th anniversary. This year’s longlist reflects our modern society with prominent themes of gender, identity and mental health.

In a situation that can only be described as a complete paradox, Australia’s richest literary prize has been won by someone who cannot collect the accolade because he’s not allowed to enter Australia.

Behrouz Boochani is a failed asylum seeker from Iran who has been held on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for almost six years. The place doesn’t get much coverage for an offshore detention centre that holds failed refugees indefinitely, and maybe it should but all that might be about to change as Boochani’s book is about his time on the island and his attempted journey to safety.

Since 2002, the Man Group has partnered with and donated £25 million to the Booker Prize and its international edition. However, it has now been announced that this year’s prize will be the final one sponsored by Man. As reported by Sky, the Booker Prize Foundation has stated its trustees are “in discussion with a new sponsor and are confident that the new funding will be in place for 2020”. The foundation’s chairwoman, Helena Kennedy described Man as an “excellent and very generous sponsor.”

Every Year, the Writers for Writers Award celebrate authors that have contributed to other the development of other writers and the broader literary community. The awards are presented at the Poets & Writers’ annual dinner and are named the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards in acknowledgement of the booksellers’ long-standing support.

This year’s winners have been announced by Poets & Writers, and the well-deserving recipients of the 2019 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award are:

Reginald Dwayne Betts – “for mentoring individuals involved in the criminal and juvenile justice systems and for his efforts to reform these systems.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts writes memoirs and poetry. His most recent collection of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era, won the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry. While his memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival and Coming of Age in Prison, is just the beginning of his campaigning to reform the criminal justice system in the UK. He has also made numerous visits to prisons and juvenile detention centres, where he shares his poetry and talks about the power of reading, literacy and mentoring those in incarceration.